Midsummer memories

Friday was Midsummer Eve. Back in the 1990s when my children were young, that was the day when we used to drive through Sweden.

The night before, I and their father would start our 4-week annual holiday. We would take the night ferry to Stockholm arriving in the morning and, after some 12 hours of driving, overnight in Denmark or somewhere in northern Germany.

On Midsummer Day, we would continue on the fast motorways of Germany down to France where we would stay another night somewhere around Strasbourg or thereabouts. The next day, we would head down to the south of France and the Mediterranean.

We would arrive at our holiday destination on Sunday evening being numb and half-dead because of sitting such a long time practically motionless in the car. Nevertheless, our feeling of happiness about the sweet caress of the heat and the certainty that the weather would stay warm throughout the holiday would overrun the discomfort tenfold.

Depending on how our Nordic midsummer or St John’s Day was placed – by us it always falls on a Saturday between June 20 and 26 – we had often times settled down in our rented apartment well before the locals would start celebrating their Fête de la Saint-Jean on June 24.

Especially in the Nordic countries and the Baltics, the feast that elsewhere commemorates the birth of St John the Baptist is primarily a festival of the summer solstice. The tradition to celebrate the longest day of the year dates back to pre-Christian times.

This June, we have had such cold and rainy weather you could hardly have guessed this weekend saw the shortest night of the year. At a time like this I do miss the Mediterranean summer. Even if it is hot and sticky it would be so wonderful not to have to sit under a blanket by a fireplace when watching the FIFA World Cup from Brazil.

All the photos of this post were taken not in the department of Var, where we used to stay, but in Nice and the surrounding towns and villages on our latest trip to the region two years ago in early August.

Parisian on tour

The previous post reminded me of another great show of a fashion designer I saw quite some time ago but haven’t reported about yet. It was an exhibition entitled The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk that was first seen at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal in 2011 and has been touring the world ever since. I visited the show with our Madrid-based friends at the Fundación Mapfre in Madrid in November 2012. (More about that trip and the wonderful Riojan tour we made with them here.)

As Gaultier is considered the most controversial of the couturiers and as he is world-famous for many celebrated iconic designs, such as the cone bra for Madonna, our expectations were high. Still, entering the Gaultier exhibition took your breath away! It was not that much the theatrical designs but the outstanding staging of the show that made you gasp in amazement. The mannequins seemed to be alive. They were blinking, turning their eyes, moving their lips, smiling... Every now and then a mannequin seemed to be looking straight into your eyes. It was simply magical!

What made it even more fascinating was the fact that they had only moulded the head of a few models for the mannequins so there were several identical faces in the same room at the same time; looking down, looking at you, even laughing or smiling at you. In the middle of it all a life-sized mannequin of Gaultier himself was greeting the visitors, in Madrid in Spanish, French and English. The projectors were rather cleverly hidden in inconspicuous white boxes hanging from the roof.

There were plenty of opportunities to explore the theatrical, even shocking details and brilliant tailoring later in the other halls of the exhibition where the mannequins were mostly faceless. The self-taught ex enfant terrible of the French haute couture is celebrating his magnificent career of more than 40 years in the fashion world with a glorious show bringing his unique creations for the general public to marvel. In Andy Worhol’s words, “Art lies in the way the whole outfit is put together. Take Jean Paul Gaultier. What he does is really art.”

If you did not see the exhibition in Montreal, Dallas, San Francisco, Madrid, Rotterdam, Stockholm, or Brooklyn, New York, where the show closed in late February, but will visit London between April and August do pop into the Barbican Centre. The Gaultier show will be there from 9 April to 25 August, 2014.

From London it will travel to Melbourne and finally to the Grand Palais in Paris from April to August, 2015. I am tempted to revisit to devote more time on the genius designs and fabulous tailoring details.

I uploaded my video on YouTube even though it is hopeless. It was my very first video ever with the point-and-shoot camera and uploading made the quality even worse. Nevertheless, it may give you a faint idea of the magic.

Actually, it is exactly the spring of 2015 when we must revisit Paris because of our 10th wedding anniversary. He vowed he will never return but I should think a decade will be enough to forgive the disappointments of your (second) honeymoon. In case you are wondering, Paris turned against us on the last day and we even missed the plane. (I dared write this fresh plan down because he seldom follows me as far as the fine print.)

Symphony of wind

Every August, the Helsinki Festival turns the city into a two-week international cultural feast. The program includes music, dance, theatre, visual arts, movies, circus, you name it. This year, even Yoko Ono (80) performed here.

A slalom through a serpentine of bamboo organs.

The festival also offers quite a number of free outdoor events. This time the most interesting of them, at least to me, was the Sounding City project, especially the Harmonic Fields, “a symphonic march for wind instruments and a moving audience”.

As the event was open on four days only and as I am a fan of street art, flash mobs and all kinds of public acts such as Improv Everywhere, I dragged him to Helsinki on a Saturday afternoon to experience the wind-composed symphony. After a sunny stroll through the soothing sounds on the Eiranranta waterfront he, too, was impressed.

Where did all the old petanque balls go? To decorate wind instruments.

Harmonic Fields or Champ harmonique is a creation of the French composer and former free-jazz trumpeter Pierre Sauvageot. He is also the leader of Lieux publics, national centre for creation in public space from Marseille, the group that brought the event to Helsinki. Lieux publics works with artists from every discipline “who make the city the location, object and subject of their productions”. Since 2001, they have accompanied some 500 events.

The instruments of wind in the Harmonic Fields production – the woodwind, strings, percussion – are custom-made for the symphony of nature. The day was rather calm and some of the tunes were pretty faint but if you pressed your ear against the instrument and closed your eyes you could catch the distant sound of the föhn, mistral or sirocco approaching.

Chairs or loungers were placed by some of the instruments inviting you to relax to their clacking, banging, whirring or buzzing melody. There were also a couple of items you could stick your head into and the current you created caused a wonderfully powerful humming sound for your ears only.

Lie down and learn to listen.

Stick your head inside this flying saucer.

The climax of the symphonic journey was waiting at the end and turning point of the walk: a circle of ‘cellos’ and drums hanging pierced by high poles with strings suspended from the top to the bottom. A row of some 15 deck chairs was placed in the middle for visitors to sit down and take their time to listen and unwind. The magical composition the gentle breeze generated could have made the heaviest of hearts surrender.

Harmonique Fields was created in 2010 and has since then delighted audiences in several European locations, most recently in Marseille, one of the two  2013 European Capitals of Culture (the other one being Kosice in Slovakia; don’t worry, I didn’t remember that either) and just before arriving at Helsinki in Genk, Belgium. Here is a link to a video of the event in the magnificent setting of Les Goudes, Marseille and here another one to a video recorded at Eiranranta in Helsinki.

Should Lieux publics bring any of their productions to a site close to you do attend!